Incubation periods of acute respiratory viral infections: a systematic review

Abstract

Knowledge of the incubation period is essential in the investigation and control of infectious disease, but statements of incubation period are often poorly referenced, inconsistent, or based on limited data. In a systematic review of the literature on nine respiratory viral infections of public-health importance, we identified 436 articles with statements of incubation period and 38 with data for pooled analysis. We fitted a log-normal distribution to pooled data and found the median incubation period to be 5·6 days (95% CI 4·8–6·3) for adenovirus, 3·2 days (95% CI 2·8–3·7) for human coronavirus, 4·0 days (95% CI 3·6–4·4) for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, 1·4 days (95% CI 1·3–1·5) for influenza A, 0·6 days (95% CI 0·5–0·6) for influenza B, 12·5 days (95% CI 11·8–13·3) for measles, 2·6 days (95% CI 2·1–3·1) for parainfluenza, 4·4 days (95% CI 3·9–4·9) for respiratory syncytial virus, and 1·9 days (95% CI 1·4–2·4) for rhinovirus. When using the incubation period, it is important to consider its full distribution: the right tail for quarantine policy, the central regions for likely times and sources of infection, and the full distribution for models used in pandemic planning. Our estimates combine published data to give the detail necessary for these and other applications.

Role of social networks in shaping disease transmission during a community outbreak of 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza

“…On the righthand side of the equation, the first term, which is referred to as the "observation model," ensures that the augmented data are consistent with observed data. In agreement with a range of studies on seasonal and H1N1pdm influenza (1,15,17,30,31), the observation model relies on the assumption that the incubation period of influenza has a mean of 1.5 d and a variance of 0.3 d 2 . The second term of Eq.…”

Tropospheric winds from northeastern China carry the etiologic agent of Kawasaki disease from its source to Japan

“…To properly characterize the time lag between an air parcel leaving the presumed source region and having an influence on KD in the selected location, the air parcel crossing times were varied from the same day to 1 mo in advance of the date associated with the peak in KD cases. We allowed such a variety of lag times to give equal chance to any value in the range of the suspected lag times for the potential KD incubation time, both according to previous hypotheses and known times for airway diseases (13)(14)(15)(16). Average residence times were therefore computed for high and low KD dates and areas with residence times greater than the threshold for a high-residence time of 30 s in the preliminary high-low maps retained for further analyses (this threshold corresponds to 95% of the average simulated residence time; Data and Methods).…”

“…Results show that not even an extremely rapidly replicating infectious disease could propagate that quickly (even diseases with idealized incubation times of only 2 h, e.g., 10 times shorter than the fastest respiratory viruses known, e.g., influenza B and rhinovirus) (15,16). No known infectious agent would be able to produce synchronous (same day) infections over distances between cities, such as those in the Tokyo metropolitan area on the basis of secondary infections only (SI Data and Methods and Fig.…”

The Impact of Demographic Variables on Disease Spread: Influenza in Remote Communities

“…The effect of this protection was captured by a reduction in transmissibility. The exposed (pre-symptomatic) period was sampled from a uniform distribution with a minimum of 24 (12) and a maximum of 48 (24) hours for T E (P E ) 19,20 . The infectious period T I was sampled from a log-normal distribution with a mean of 74 hours (3.1 days) and standard deviation of 12 hours.…”